Opera Mini finds out what its Indian users get up to

Users of the Opera Mini mobile browser have saved 40,135,582 GB (36,000 Terabytes) of data in one year*, according to an analysis** of the behaviour of Opera Mini users in India. Opera Mini’s compression technology shrinks data by up to 90%, helping users save approximately Rs690 crore (Rs6.9 billion), when calculated on the basis of 1GB costing an average of Rs173.
 
Search is the primary reason to go online from a web browser

Eight out of 10 Opera Mini users in India frequent Google to search online. Although search websites experience a high amount of visitors, the number of search pages viewed account for only 10% of all pages. It is possible that these users then branch out to news and download websites, which make up 28% and 17% respectively of the top 100 most-visited websites.

Social networking accounts for the bulk of time spent online

More than half of all webpages viewed by Opera Mini users (55%) are social-networking sites. Facebook leads the pack - half of all webpages opened by users are from Facebook. Other popular social destinations are blogging sites, such as Blogspot and WordPress, followed by Twitter, Pinterest and Quora.

News is the second-most popular type of content viewed by users

Thirty-one news websites are part of the list of top 100 websites for Opera Mini users in India. Consumers are reading up on general news to sports and technology as well as politics. Opera also found that there is a consistent growth in visits to news sites in the Hindi language.

“With their increased usage of smartphones, consumers have moved beyond using Internet only for social networking. Consumers are now using their smartphones as handheld computers to browse news, shop online, watch movies and listen to music on the move,” says Bruce Lawson, Deputy CTO at Opera. “To stay ahead of our consumers’ ever-evolving needs, we keep updating Opera Mini to help them browse faster and more efficiently. The latest version of Opera Mini comes with new updates such as language support, ad blocker integration and video boost.”

Music sites are most visited among download portals

Of the top 100 sites visited by Opera Mini users in India, 24 are download portals. Three quarters  of these are for downloading music. The most-visited websites include Mp3lio, Pagalworld, Webmusic, Raagtune and Mp3mad.

YouTube is the all-time favourite for viewing videos

The rise of affordable smartphones with large HD screens means today’s consumers are watching more videos on the go. With faster 3G availability and features like Opera Mini’s video boost feature, consumers also can watch video with fewer buffer delays. YouTube continues to be one of the top-three most visited sites in India, along with Google and Facebook. In terms of video-streaming sites, YouTube is followed by Vuclip, Dailymotion and Hotstar.

Browsing products from smartphones gaining popularity

Consumers find it more convenient to check out products from their smartphones. E-commerce and classifieds mobile websites provide an equally enriching shopping experience compared to their desktop or app versions. Around 9% of the top 100 websites visited are e-commerce and classified websites. Some of the most visited sites are Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, ShopClues, AskMeBazaar and Olx.

 

*Calculation of savings in data cost: From the 12 months of data between June 2015 - May 2016, we were able to determine the amount of data that was sent from the websites to Opera’s servers (uncompressed data) and the data that Opera sent to users’ phones (compressed data) after shrinking it. This gave us the total amount of data that Opera’s servers helped save users in 12 months: 40,135,582 GB. Then, to be fair, we used an average of 2G in data costs (1 GB at Rs173) to calculate the minimum amount that users ended up saving to arrive with the figure of Rs690 crore worth data saved.

**Information contained in this report is based on aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers from June 2015 to May 2016. All content analysis is based on a review of the top sites ranked according to the number of unique visitors in India. The designation of sites to specific categories has been done with local content experts who followed Opera’s guidelines to characterise each site. Adult-only sites have been excluded from the analysis.